(left) Carrie McLaughlin walks around a water source that Engineers Without Borders along with the NGO CII-ASDENIC were attempting to develop near Venecia, a coffee-farming community in Nicaragua. (right) The engineering team with a group of students hike up to the water source near Venecia.
Photos courtesy of CarrieMcLaughlin

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Vermont, despite its beauty, can at times be isolating. The rural setting and spotty access to high-speed Internet and cell phones help to insulate the Green Mountain State’s residents from the rush and buzz of the outside world; it’s a bubble many of us seek and enjoy.

But some Vermonters, like the women featured here, have sought to apply their skills and experience to work and volunteer in far-off places. In all cases, they have made countless lives better and have brought back important lessons for their own lives and communities here in Vermont.

Bringing Clean Water to Nicaragua

Carrie McLaughlin, an electrical engineer, first became involved with Engineers Without Borders (EWB, www.ewb-usa.org) while living in San Francisco. She volunteered to be part of a team that traveled to Haiti to do energy work, and “it opened my eyes,” she says of seeing another part of the world where people lived in extreme poverty but were happy and surrounded by a beautiful landscape. “The people in Haiti were wonderful. There is no way that Haiti got more from me than I got from it,” she says of her volunteer experience.

When she returned to Vermont to work as an engineer in the coffee-roasting plant at Green Mountain Coffee (GMC) in Waterbury, she sought to maintain her connection to EWB, so she helped form a Vermont chapter for which she serves as president. “I wanted to do more and help other engineers to have a similar experience to mine in Haiti,” she says. McLaughlin reached out to her connections at GMC and sought input from Rick Peyser, a longtime GMC employee (now retired) who worked on supply-chain outreach in coffee communities like Nicaragua.

EWB invites communities to bring their engineering problems to them, and in Nicaragua, McLaughlin learned that communities were in need of help with water distribution. “We brought our testing equipment, too, and learned there were also contamination issues from E. coli as well,” she says. McLaughlin assembled a team, including a project manager, an engineer-in-charge, an engineering design team, and a person responsible for knowledge transfer to help educate local civil engineers and community members. The group then applied to the national headquarters of EWB for project approval, a process that McLaughlin managed as well. Once approved, the team traveled to the community four times to design a water treatment and distribution system that would bring clean water to the community and help them to use water better. Beyond drinking, cooking, and cleaning, the water is needed for food security, like home gardens. The team also helped establish a gray water recycling system for water conservation.

McLaughlin says her international volunteer work has opened up her professional network. But it’s the personal gain that drives her to do this work: “It’s my soul food,” she says. “I really like my job, but it’s not fulfilling like this is.”

Making a Difference in Bali

Erin Ryan, a licensed midwife and graduate student in public health living in Worcester, had always dreamed of Bali—but not for the typical reasons. It wasn’t a tropical vacation or spiritual journey she longed for. Instead, she wanted to go there to work.
Indonesia, including the island of Bali, has the second highest maternal death rate in the world (after Africa). Every hour, a woman there dies from giving birth or of causes related to pregnancy. Poor access to health care, along with women being treated like second-class citizens, means a high maternal mortality rate. Out-of-date training and misinformation exacerbate the problem.

Ryan knew of a midwife, Robin Lim, who had devoted her life’s work to helping solve this problem. According to a recent CNN article, Lim and her husband sold their house in Hawaii and moved to Bali to reinvent their lives by setting up a rural clinic for pregnant and birthing women, which also serves as an educational center for local midwives (visit Bumi Sehat at www.bumidehatfoundation.org to learn more).

When an undergraduate student of Ryan’s left the US to work in Lim’s clinic in Bali, Ryan, dreaming of helping, cut a map of Bali out of a National Geographic magazine and taped it to her dryer. “I put it there because I’m a mom. I’m always doing laundry,” she says with a laugh. She would gaze at the map and imagine traveling to Bali to work someday. Just 48 hours after putting up that map, she got a phone call from her student: Lim was going away, and the clinic needed a substitute midwife to take her place in seven weeks. Could Ryan do it?

That night, Ryan sat down and talked with her husband about the possibility of going. “I knew we could wait and plan our trip and never actually go—or just do it.” So they did: despite the short notice, she moved her husband and three children, aged 2, 6, and 8, to live in Bali so that Ryan could work at the clinic; then several months later, they returned for another two years.

In the clinic, Ryan served as an educator and pitched in on the clinic rotation, catching babies, cleaning up, and helping with anything else that needed to be done. As an educator, Ryan was careful never to tell the local midwives that they were doing their work wrong.

"A big issue in global work is going over there and telling them they’re doing it wrong,” she says. “Sometimes I would hear them say things that sounded like they were out of a 1970’s medical guide, or I would see them doing something that was clearly wrong, but I would approach it like this: ‘I see you’re doing this, and I sometimes do it this way. Have you thought about trying that?’”

“I learned that different isn’t wrong,” she says. It’s something that has stuck with her now that she is back in the United States running her own small midwifery practice in Montpelier. “You can put that on a tote bag or a T-shirt,” she says. “But coming home and accepting my own judgments of other people or racism that, as much as we would like to say doesn’t exist, does, I had to look at people around me who are different and say, ‘Different isn’t wrong.’”

She continues to serve as a consultant for the midwives in Bali, who can contact her for free using iMessage. “It’s just as I would seek an opinion or suggestion from a colleague in my own practice,” she says. The relationships she built while in Bali have stayed with her as well. “That’s how we exchange ideas; we’re all expanding our thinking,” she says.

Bringing US Values to Jerusalem

Kerry McIntosh was in high school in Bennington on September 11, 2001. She had already been deeply interested in Middle Eastern culture and saw many stereotypes in how Middle Eastern people were portrayed in the media following the attacks. In particular, she recognized gaps in Americans’ understanding of these cultures.

After high school, McIntosh went on to study international politics and spent a year studying abroad in Egypt, where she earned a graduate degree in Middle Eastern studies at The American University in Cairo. Her first professional position was a two-year post as a foreign service officer in Nigeria, West Africa. She did consulate work there, helping Nigerians gain visas to travel to the United States and aiding US citizens living in Nigeria.

Her next post brought her to Jerusalem, where she worked for two years at the US Consulate General, which is an independent mission that serves Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. It functions similarly to an embassy but is separate and distinct. There, she administered small grants through the US–Middle East Partnership Initiative (mepi.state.gov) to Palestinian nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). These grants supported varied projects, such as supporting democratic values, women’s rights, and independent media. One project looked for places in Palestinian law that could discriminate against divorced women; another connected the parents of children with disabilities with support services.

Traveling to Egypt, West Africa, and Jerusalem has expanded her horizons. For one, she now sees that travel doesn’t need to feel intimidating. “Traveling to Africa, I was worried about crime and malaria and other diseases,” she says. “I do take precautions, but international travel is not as intimidating as I thought.”

She has also learned to be open-minded about different cultures. For example, American’s misconceptions about Middle Eastern culture often center on the style of dress, in particular for women who dress far more modestly than those in the US such that even a T-shirt might be too revealing. But McIntosh points out that this is not a discriminatory thing but rather a way to be respectful, and that it would feel uncomfortable to women to be underdressed compared to the women around them. “Making an effort to understand will go a long way,” she says. “Be open-minded, and you’ll be surprised.”

While living in Jerusalem, McIntosh stayed in an apartment provided by the state department, in a neighborhood that included both Palestinians and Israelis. She would often see them working out at the same neighborhood gym. “Jerusalem is interesting because there are two cultures in the same place,” she says. Despite what is often shown on the evening news, she found Middle Eastern people to be very hospitable: shopkeepers would invite her to stay for pastry and tea. “Jerusalem is a complicated place, but at the end of the day, people aren’t all that different. Palestinians and Israelis both want peace, to enjoy their lives, and to have opportunity.” Looking forward, she plans to continue her foreign service to promote civil society and progress human rights to help people live better lives.

Education Scholarships for El Salvador

Sharon Rives and her husband, Paul Kendall, of Braintree, traveled in 2004 to El Salvador, Central America, to observe the presidential election, in which Antonio Saca of the Nationalist Republican Alliance won with 57 percent of the vote. While there, they witnessed a clear influence—even interference—from the United States, which threatened, among other things, to revoke the visas of El Salvadorans currently living in the US. Doing this has severe consequences in a country where an estimated 15 to 20 percent of the population immigrates to the US and sends money home to an estimated additional 20 percent of the population (see an article on their findings in the Randolph Harold http://m.ourherald.com/node/49152#.VpGGvllIDnM).

The invitation for Rives and Kendall to observe the election came after Kendall volunteered to drive a school bus from Toronto, Canada, to San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador, as part of an entourage of used buses being given to local municipalities for use as public transportation, mobile health clinics, and bookmobiles. While there, the couple learned that, after a 12-year civil war that was supported in part by the US backing of El Salvadoran paramilitaries, the country was ravaged. The civil war took lives and infrastructure and set the country back decades. “Thereafter, people who had been influential were gone, towns were gone,” says Rives. “The entire professional class was missing.” They learned that gang activity was a national problem, and that the US was behind this trend as well: El Salvadoran immigrants imprisoned in the US became caught up in gang activity while in prison, and then returned home with this mentality.

While in El Salvador, Rives learned about SHARE (www.share-elsalvador.org), a nonprofit that rebuilds the people and communities of El Salvador. Wanting to help, Rives asked what was needed and learned that the country desperately needed educated and trained professionals, such as teachers, lawyers, nurses, and agriculturalists. These professionals are necessary to build vital communities. One mayor told her that when his community needed a professional, one was sent from San Salvador; but these visiting professionals were not invested in the communities. Rives worked with SHARE to set up a scholarship program, funded by her and her husband, for El Salvadoran high school students to attend universities so that they could return to their communities with professional skills.

The scholarship program started in 2004 with four students, and new students have been added each year. Now, 25 scholarships have been given to students who meet four criteria: high school graduation, high scores on the national university exam, a demonstrated potential to be a leader in their community, and the community’s recommendation. So far, 19 students have graduated. “It transforms the student, the student’s family, the student’s town, the whole region,” says Rives.

To expand the impact of this scholarship program, Rives brings high school students from Randolph to the graduations of students in El Salvador. They attend the ceremonies and parties and in the process have their own transformations. “They see these students live with their families in tin shacks. Some travel two hours each way to school, with the danger of great violence along the way [due to high levels of gang activity in El Salvador],” says Rives.

“It’s a hopeful story,” she says, despite tremendous societal problems in El Salvador. “There is a hunger for relationships— those are transformative. It’s a way for people in Vermont to have an impact in a country where the US helped create this problem.”

Sarah Galbraith is a freelance writer living in Marshfield, Vermont.